our services

Unlike most small business consulting companies, every service that we offer has been developed, refined, and then successfully implemented in a small business that we have owned or personally managed.

INCREASE SALES

We approach sales issues by asking you one question first: do you need more customers or do you need more revenue per customer? From there we work with you to identify which type of revenue generating mechanism will work the best for your business.

i need more customers

No one can be an expert in every type of marketing - We specialize in effective 21st-century digital tools for gaining customers.

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We work with you to make sure you have a unique value proposition and an up-to-date website that conveys this info complete with the latest tools.

Once this is done, we make sure customers can find you online by developing or refining your digital marketing strategy using Google Adwords.

If you have a business that can take advantage of social media, online reviews, or community management, we will create a robust strategy for each element that will be easy to follow and have immediate ROI.

If you already have customers, but think you are leaving money on the table, we can help increase the revenue per customers.

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First we look at your product or service offerings and work with you to identify what upsells and add-ons we can introduce.

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With the new product or service offerings, we test them with your customers and develop the best-practices to increase the upsell percentage.

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Finally, we will develop sales training for new staff members to get them quickly up-to-speed.

related excerpt from startup to sold

I had a couple seconds to differentiate the business in a way that customers preferred. And when I realized what it was, I changed my ad to read “Don’t Send Your Precious Memories by Mail. We’re in San Diego, CA.”

And just like that twice as many customers clicked through to my website. I also changed the content of my website to further drive home the message that we were local. Within two months revenue more than quadrupled! In April, I was struggling to eat and nearly going broke, and by the end of May, I was earning more than eighteen thousand dollars per month.

related excerpt from startup to sold

As a company, if we increased the upsell and add-on percentage of each sale, we would increase our profits considerably. But what was the right way to train our technicians to work on upsell percentages? Then I remembered my experience back at the electronics store.

At the electronics store I had been given the upsell numbers nearly every hour. The sales manager would come around with them. Not only would we see the percentage, but it would show our rank within the company for the day, the month, and the quarter. It was very cool, and I remember being somewhat motivated to have our store be the best. Today we refer to this technique as gamifying sales. However, it is not only gamifying by providing a competitive environment, but it also plays into the Hawthorn Effect, which states that employees will improve in areas in which they know they are being measured.

automating operations

Typically small business owners specialize in either sales/marketing or in operations. If you are the former, we will get your operations under control and keep your product or service quality consistent.

Approach to automating operations

It is a common misconception to think that creativity only applies to art and not to operations in entrepreneurship. Let it be known now and forever-- business is a creative process.

We were creating the systems for a business model that had never existed before—at least not that we could find. No one could tell us how to do it—how to run this operation. We had to think outside the box because there was no box...

We believe that systems should run the business - being robust and fine-tuned in order to eliminate error and create consistency at all levels of a business.

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Once systems are created they need to be trained (and possibly refined) with the staff. This ensures that even with turnover, your business will produce a high quality product or service.

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Finally, we provide a dashboard of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) allowing you to see the the health of your business at a glance. This will give you peace-of-mind going forward to know when thing are going well and when a fire is about to break out.

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An essential side benefit of system building and training is that it will free you up to work on other areas of the business.

Approach to scale & expand business

Expansing a business will test every part of the organization. Every problem you have will be magnified by the rate of your growth. It is essential before you expand to look at your business with a critical eye and fill-in any gaps.

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We will start by taking a deep-dive into your company to find and fix areas that need improvement. This can be in any area, not those listed in the above services.

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Finally, we will help you create a plan for this growth. It is sort of like business plan, but specifically geared the new growth related activities.

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This process can also be valuable if you are looking to raise money to fund the growth.

Bryan and I worked together, first on the vision and goal of the position. The goal was for the company to have a document, or even a thumb drive, with all the instructions to open a new store. It outlined everything from how to choose an office broker, how to choose a location, the equipment to purchase--and from where, and even how to many copies of keys. The document included pages and pages of digital documents, living documents that he constantly updated and followed, tested and refined.